Using the state’s voter registration website, someone with access to voters’ personal information changed their party affiliations without their knowledge or consent, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said Wednesday, July 6.

Hestrin’s comments validate earlier complaints of voter-registration tampering by local Republican Party leaders and others. They also expose a potential flaw in the state’s online voter registration system in which someone can impersonate a voter and change his or her information.

It’s unclear how widespread the problem is or whether it’s a new threat to California elections.

Earlier this month, a spokesman for the California Secretary of State’s office, which oversees elections and voter rolls, said no evidence had been found “to suggest any breach of our voter registration database.”

And although Hestrin said his office received “a few dozen complaints,” Riverside County’s registrar of voters has reported just two complaints from voters who said their party affiliation was changed.

There doesn’t appear to be a common bond among the voters who said their party affiliation was changed without their knowledge, Hestrin said.

“However, I understand from talking to many out in various communities that there were others who experienced the same problem who did not report it to law enforcement but simply voted by provisional ballot and then fixed their party affiliation,” Hestrin added.

Complaints from voters and others surfaced before and during California’s June 7 primary election. Only registered Republicans were allowed to vote in the state GOP primary, and many Republican voters in Riverside County said their affiliation was changed to Democrat or something else.

In some cases, voters said they learned of the switch at their polling place. It’s not clear how many of those voters did not cast ballots in the primary or filled out provisional ballots.

The voters in question included Nathan Miller, a Riverside County Community College District trustee and county GOP official who said he looked up his registration online to see his party affiliation was switched to Democrat on April 11. He switched it back.

County GOP Chairman Scott Mann sounded the alarm about the complaints, and Hestrin’s office assigned an investigator to look into the matter.

UNAUTHORIZED CHANGES

Hestrin said in some cases, the switch was due to voter confusion. But a preliminary investigation revealed that someone with access to Social Security numbers and other private data went to the state’s voter registration website, pretended to be a voter and changed that voter’s affiliation, the district attorney said.

“This appears to have happened in several of the cases,” he said.

Registered Republicans as well as Democrats complained about party affiliation switches, Hestrin said, adding that complaints came from elected officials, political candidates and regular voters.

Hestrin’s office contacted state officials, only to learn that IP addresses – computers’ digital fingerprints – were not retained by the California voter registration website, he said.

Anyone with information about who is behind the registration tampering can email Assistant Chief Investigator Wayne Hoy at whoy@rivcoda.org.

Late last week, a spokesman for California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, said his office had received five complaints through an Election Day hotline from Riverside County voters reporting they had been registered with the wrong party or were not on the voter rolls.

He encouraged those who believe it happened to them to contact the office.

“As our office receives allegations of unauthorized voter registration changes, we follow up with county elections officials to identify how such a change could occur and then work to resolve any outstanding issues,“ Mahood said. “When appropriate, cases may be forwarded to investigators or law enforcement officials.”

Mahood’s statement did not address Hestrin’s comment on the missing IP addresses.

COUNTY CONTROL

In late May, Riverside County Registrar of Voters Rebecca Spencer said she was aware of two complaints – one from Miller – from voters who said their party affiliation was changed without their knowledge.

“Two people out of almost 900,000 registered voters have told us their party affiliation was switched without their consent,” she said. “We rectified those two cases and sent documentation for both to the California Secretary of State’s fraud unit.”

Spencer did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment.

County spokesman Ray Smith noted the county does not control the state’s online voter registration system that “anyone who has the California driver’s license or California identification card number, the last four digits of the Social Security number, and the date of birth for another person … can access the state system and change a registration without a voter’s consent.”

“In instances when specific voter ID information was available (vs. secondhand, anecdotal reports with vague IDs), the registrar researched the voting records and the reported changes turned out largely to be incorrect,” Smith said.

Mann called for more voter safeguards.

“Bad choices at the polls can destroy or improve economic opportunities for all of us,” he said. “However, some voters in Riverside County did not even get to make a choice on June 7th because someone deliberately sought to undermine a right guaranteed to us by the U.S. Constitution.”

“It is my fond hope that whoever did this is charged, tried, and convicted, and I call on the California Legislature to enact safeguards to improve voter integrity in this state,” Mann said.

Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” After graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then-U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper before love and the quest for snowless winters took him in 2007 to Southern California, where he started out covering Temecula for The Press-Enterprise. Today, Jeff writes about Riverside County government and regional politics. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildfires, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner workings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even if it involves a little math.